


defiling heaven

by LunaInvidia



Category: Changeling: The Lost, World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: Angels, Blasphemy, Blood, Dream Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Lucid Dreaming, Luke/Aqui, OC/OC - Freeform, Porn with Feelings, Pseudo-Incest, Religious Themes, Sibling Incest, Wingfic, depending on how you slice it i guess, lucifer/michael (not supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:41:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26613148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaInvidia/pseuds/LunaInvidia
Summary: They were angels, or they thought they were- after a shared Durance set against the backdrop of a Keeper's bloody heaven, Aquilegia and Luke are not sure what they are to each other. In a shared dream, Luke finally gets what he wants, and Aqui finds what she didn't know she was looking for.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	defiling heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Luke was Lucifer, once, and Aquilegia was the Archangel Michael. Prophetically, they should destroy each other, but Aqui has never been much for following the rules. 
> 
> they're sort of siblings idk what you want from me, read the tags please.

She opened her eyes and she was alone.

She had never been alone on the battlefield, the Archangel Michael leading the heavenly host- but she was alone, and- 

-yes, she remembered now. Drawing her sword one final time and cutting off the hair He had so loved, taking that first step with Doubt in her heart, and watching the ground part to spill her from the sky into a mass of thorns. 

It had been almost too easy, and she was gripped with a blinding fear that she had not escaped, never really made it out. But the ground did not give under her feet, and she remembered. 

_I am Aquilegia, of Autumn. This is a dream._

She rarely dreamed of heaven, not her Keeper’s heaven, at any rate. She had chased that from her heart, mastered her fears to strengthen her mantle. So she was not afraid now, but curious, as she walked barefoot across the bloodstained clouds of Heaven’s battleground. There had to be a reason she was here. 

Aqui took stock, assessing her dreamself- short, flaming hair, as it should be. The armor she’d worn in Arcadia was gone, but the draping, diaphanous white thing in its place was nothing she would have worn awake. She put her hand to her back and found no wings, but her hand came away slick with blood. 

It didn’t hurt, at least. She put her palm to her lips and blew across it like a blowing a kiss, and the red peeled away like petals and drifted off.

Ahead, across the empty fields, there were the echoes of swords and screams. Like a mirage shimmering into view, slowly a figure emerged from the nothing, fighting ghosts she couldn’t see. A seraph, blond and brilliant, dripping black ichor that stained his robes and his six shining wings

 _Lucifer,_ she thought, and the Wyrd sang his name in her ears. _Luke_. He was real, not some figment of a nightmare. Maybe this was his dream, not hers- but that shouldn’t be possible. He was halfway across town in his luxurious penthouse, curled up with his pretty little flowering girlfriend.

But here they were, and she took off running, sure suddenly that he hadn’t yet realized what was happening. “Luke!” she shouted, hoping to break through whatever it was he was seeing and hearing.

He turned, and the ghosts- more visible now, like shapes of grey smoke- parted for her. They weren’t _her_ ghosts, somehow. She wondered if one of them was meant to stand in for her, or if they were all just nameless, faceless, forgotten feelings. There was a nasty, furied recognition as their matching golden eyes locked. 

He spat at her, something in Latin. In her fullest glory she would have understood him without needing the language. She even, briefly, _did_ understand him, but then even the memory of what he meant dissolved away. 

“Luke, it’s me,” she said stupidly, as if she wasn’t just as likely to be a figure in a nightmare. He lunged at her with a slash of a spear, slicing her open from throat to belly. Her scream echoed off the invisible edges of the world.

“Fucking shitfuck-” she snarled, and maybe it was the vulgarity of the language, so _un_ angelic, or the bloom of human blood down her front, but he paused. Blinked, staring back at her with confusion writ across his handsome face, and the spear dropped from his hand. It bounced and shattered into a thousand motes of light, and was gone. 

“...Aqui,” he said, and she exhaled hard. 

“Yeah, _me,”_ she said. She clutched her chest, watching her thin white gown go crimson, and looked back up. “Did you do this? The dream thing, I mean.” The seam of her body was already knitting back together with a little effort of will, at least. “Didn’t know you could do that without being part of the same motley. Warn me before you come vacationing in my head, okay?”   
  
“I didn’t,” he said, slowly. “Believe me, I would have picked a nicer setting, if I was doing this.” He shifted, slowly; his wings were not healing the way her chest was, and it looked painful.   
  


“Oh.” She stared at him for a moment, both of them frozen in not-quite-a nightmare, and then he dropped to his knees, exhausted. He chuckled, hollowly. 

“Is this yours, then? The dream?”

“I don’t think it’s either of ours,” she answered. “It just... seems to _be._ Maybe I’ll ask around and see if shared dreams are a usual thing, outside of a motley or a contract...” She stopped talking as she realized that he wasn’t listening, trying to get to his feet but failing. Luke muttered under his breath, but it was like he was sinking into the cloudy floor, just a few inches. 

“Hey- don’t try and get up-” she said, dropping down to his side. “Can’t you just relax a sec?” 

“No,” he bit back, _“no,_ I’ve had my dreams messed with before, and I’m not about to sit here and let it happen again.” He looked around, as if trying to see something else, and then he closed his eyes briefly before opening them again with a frustrated growl. “I can’t even wake up properly.”   
  
Aqui frowned- she wasn’t an oneiromancer by any stretch of the imagination, but that wasn’t supposed to happen, was it? She, too, tried to pull herself from the dream, and met with- absolutely nothing. No sensation, but not the void of one, just nothing at all. Like trying to wake up when you were already awake. 

He hissed as one of his wings brushed the ground, leaving black trails, and she winced sympathetically. _“Luke.”_

He might as well have been unable to hear her for all the attention he paid her, but the more he struggled, the more he seemed to be slowing down and sinking into a mental quicksand. _So, his nightmare then, and his nightmare still._

She reached out and grabbed one of his wings, and he went absolutely frozen still. 

When they had been together in Arcadia, part of the same brotherhood of angel changelings, their wings had naturally been a source of pride. When she had awoken in an alleyway in Salt Lake City, the loss of hers had somehow hurt the worst. Michael the Archangel would never have touched Lucifer’s wings. 

“Come here,” she said, letting go. “You’re making it- whatever it is- worse.” 

“Oh, and I’m sure you’re unaffected,” he snapped. “Convenient.” 

“It's not like I can wake up either,” she said. “Please, Luke, I promise I’m not trying to hurt you, or whatever. It just looks- painful.” 

He glanced at his wings, as if seeing them in their battered state for the first time. His body seemed untouched, but the wings...

“They seem to be a constant,” he muttered. “In dreams, that is.” 

“Worry about it later,” Aqui replied. She tore a strip from the hem of her gown, and beckoned for him to sit. “When’s the last time anyone took care of them for you? Don’t answer that, I figure I can guess.” 

He took a few seconds to move, but eventually managed to seat himself in front of her, and she began very delicately dabbing at the streaks of black ichor. Luke sucked in a breath.

“That hurts.” 

“I can’t make it not hurt,” she answered, “I think you have to do that.” He grumbled, and she set the cloth aside, brushing her fingers through the twisted feathers gently. His intake of breath was mostly surprise, this time, but he didn’t try to move as she pulled a few feathers free where they had broken and coaxed the bent primaries back into shape. There was little she could do about the staining, she thought, but at her touch, they seemed to spring back to glossy white. Like it had been _before,_ when they were all together, laughing and caring for each other. Before the war, before Lucifer’s rebellion. There was a pang of something- painful nostalgia, maybe, just the shrapnel of traumatic memories- and she shook it off. This, if anything, was better. It was a choice, to sit and preen her fallen brother’s wings. It wasn’t scripted, the outcome a forgone conclusion, the way it once had been. 

Aqui hummed, her rich voice filling the space as if she could heal his wounds with the sound. Her voice was undoubtedly why she had been chosen- she had come out of Arcadia a _flamesiren,_ after all, but singing on her own had been Vanity, and now she tamped down the fear of being the only voice here, and raised her song up as a hymn to faithlessness. 

When she quieted, Luke twisted around to look at her. “You should keep going,” he said. “It makes this all feel... less disgustingly empty.” He gestured at the expanse of clouds and sky. 

She laughed. “It was taking too much of my focus. I don’t want to break any feathers.” She brushed her hands along the pinions of his middle set of wings, noting the way he shuddered and sighed. They quivered under her touch. The tension of ruling a city, even for just a season, seemed to be locked tight into his muscles. Aqui was not a healer, but her hands were strong and sure, and this at least she could do something about. _Just like back muscles,_ she thought, trying to remember tidbits gleaned from a massage book she’d picked up in a secondhand bookstore, somewhere in between jobs. She stroked firm circles at the very base of the wings, working out the tension knotted there. 

The Spring King did not typically do such undignified things as _whimper,_ but there was definitely a little broken sound that escaped his throat. “I....I forgot,” he muttered, on a stuttered inhale, “how _good_ that could feel.” 

“Lean forward,” she said, palms flat along his back and shoving gently so she could reach the bottom set. She dug her fingertips into the muscle and worked outwards, fanning her fingers through the edges of the feathers and down. They gleamed more with every stroke of her hands, her palms silky with oil. She leaned in to inhale the scent of other angel- sandalwood, maybe. It wasn’t his waking-life expensive cologne, which meant this must just be how he smelled. Like salt and incense and sin. 

Luke chuckled low in his throat as he realized that her hands had slowed, and he took the opportunity to reach back and grab her hands. Dream sentimentality meant she let him, and he pulled her forward, wrapping her arms around his torso.

“And here I didn’t think that would work,” he laughed, and she rolled her eyes. 

“I can’t deny you attention all the time,” she responded, adjusting her position to let him curl up in her lap. Which he did, shamelessly affectionate. His wings were clean and polished, the stains gone, even the injuries gone- all save one she hadn’t noticed- a wash of blood down one side, just down his ribs. “...Does that hurt?” she asked, worried, and he glanced down with a frown.

  
“No...?” he said. “It wasn’t there a second ago, I would have noticed.” She tried to let go of him, and he clung on tighter, instinctively. “It’s fine, Aqui, I’m fine-” 

“You’re bleeding _all over,”_ she retorted. “At least let me-“ 

She was bending over him in her lap, midsentence, and consequently missed the dazed, heated look in his eyes that meant he was about to reach up and kiss her. Which he did, and she automatically put her arms around him like some kind of fucked-up Pieta. 

He broke away first, looking uncharacteristically ashamed. “I- Aqui-” He glanced down, and back up. “...Please tell me you desired that as much as I did.” 

“I didn’t,” she said, honestly enough, and his face fell. It _hurt_ to watch. “I mean- it wasn’t- it wasn’t bad. I’ve never kissed a man before and- _you’re bleeding!”_

“Only because you wound me,” he said, with a ghost of his usual cocky grin. He sat up, putting some space between them and some pressure on his side. Like the blood from her hands, it seemed to be already drying, dropping away into scarlet petals. Literal rose petals, she would bet. “Your desires are your own, of course, I just-” 

“Shut up,” Aqui said, mildly, and then closed the distance between them. He was startled enough to let her tangle a hand into his rich blond hair, and then she kissed him, with a bit less than either of their usual grace. 

It felt like magnets coming together, somehow- she had never been attracted to a man and she hadn’t thought she was attracted to him, but she couldn’t deny the flare of sudden heat along her nerves. This was never supposed to have happened- brother and sister, the serpent and the saint, and yet- it felt like some little missing piece clicked into place. 

“I hate you,” she muttered, in between kissing him. 

“You’ve got a sincerely shocking way of showing it,” he replied, pausing to tip her face up. “What’s gotten into you? Can it be that you finally realized how devastatingly charming and handsome I am, and come to your senses?”   
  


“I can definitively say it isn’t that,” she said with an eye roll. “It has nothing to do with your pretty face, and everything to do with wiping that stupid sad _look_ off of it.” 

“Ah, so this is pity,” he responded with a raised eyebrow. “Well, don’t put yourself _out_ on my behalf.” He sounded genuinely frustrated, and Aqui leaned back with a muffled curse at herself. 

“...It’s not just that, and you know it.” 

“No, Aquilegia, I _don’t,”_ he bit back. “I feel like you’re always putting walls up.I _don’t_ know how much is you just- putting up with me, or waiting for me to prove you right about something-” He broke off with a sigh. She worried her lip with her teeth. 

“I’ve never been good with words,” she started, and reached out to touch him again, just one hand loosely curled around his wrist. He didn’t make a move to move towards her or away. “I don’t know _what_ we are, but....” She stroked a line up the satiny inside of his wrist with her thumb, watching him shiver. “....I just wanted to do that again. It wasn’t pity.”

“Still sounds like it to me,” he said, but softly, and she tugged him into her again. 

“Then let me try again?” 

He started to say something else, with a little glint in his golden eyes that said it was probably going to be something on the sliding scale of charm to smarm, and she grabbed his face and kissed him again, effectively shutting him up. He responded enthusiastically this time, grabbing her around the waist and clinging like he couldn’t quite get close enough. Kissing him was like kissing no one else she’d ever been with. He was so suave, so _unbearably fucking charming,_ that she had expected kissing him to be the same, but he was a little rough, eager in a way that let her know even at his gentlest he would still be harder and sharper than the handful of pretty girls with pretty soft faces that Aqui had kissed before. 

Speaking of _hard,_ his erection was plainly obvious through the draping, clinging robes, and she curiously brushed her fingertips across it, earning a sharp hiss. “And here I thought torture was supposed to be my job,” he muttered, attempting a smile. Aqui shook her head, distractedly.

  
She knew theory here, had watched straight porn a few times out of sheer curiosity and had a clear-jelly facsimile of a dick at the bottom of her duffle bag, but she had never _touched_ one. (And usually she was the one wearing the jelly, if she was honest). He didn’t seem inclined to stop her, so she took him in hand experimentally, getting another bitten-off curse. 

“Sorry, I-”   
  
“Only apologize if you’re going to stop,” he got out through gritted teeth, and gave her an indignant glare when she laughed. “I swear, you are the worst tease. Is that done to torment me?”   
  
“I’ll show _you_ teasing,” she retorted, and then, trying to remember what little technique she’d absorbed from watching _Pornstar Therapy 2,_ she adjusted her position and mouthed at his cock through the fabric. The shocked noise he made was completely worth it. 

She glanced up, wanting to appreciate his face, which was somewhere between confusion and excitement, with maybe a hint of awe. That might have been her own arrogance talking, she wasn’t sure. “Strip,” she ordered, trying to make it sound less like a question, and he chuckled.   
  
“Look at you, breaking all kinds of taboos left and right. Positively filthy. Watch your _teeth._ ”

“I know, I know,” she shot back, as he stood and languidly dropped his robes. He was completely whole now, she realized- not a scratch on him. She’d seen him naked before, though at the time she had been trying her hardest _not_ to look- she’d told herself she wasn’t interested, she’d told herself it wasn’t proper, she’d told herself she didn’t want to upset Usagi- but there was no one here now but the two of them. On holy ground, as it were, and if they weren’t killing each other outright... maybe this was fulfilling some other darker, older, prophecy. 

Or maybe she was just more of a wanton than she’d ever considered herself to be. 

Either way, she slid onto her knees before him, his grin dark and wide in his shining face. Whatever little hint of vulnerability he’d shown was gone, which was somehow disappointing, but the _look_ he was giving her made up for it. Like a forgotten god who had finally found a worshipper again. 

She dragged her lips up his thigh and nuzzled her face into him. It was not quite a kiss, but not quite anything else, and she did it again on the other side to match before she backed off. Taking a deep breath and pretending she wasn’t nervous as hell, she licked a stripe up the underside of his cock and then drew the rest of it into her mouth at once. Or as much as she could manage without choking. 

_Fuck if I had known I was ever going to do this, I would have PRACTICED or something._

Well, she’d always been told she had a talented tongue, and now she put it to work, a bit limited in her usual scope but still finding effective ways to trace the softness of his skin up, down, and in small, ever-widening circles. Luke was mostly still, but she closed her eyes and focused and with her world narrowed to the weight of his cock in her mouth, it was easy to tell when he gasped slightly, or his body tensed. 

“Aqui-”   
  
“Mmmh?” she hummed around him, eyes jolting open to meet his. 

“You don’t have to be- _quite_ that gentle,” he said, and she blinked, pulling back to adjust.

“ I don’t know what I’m doing,” she reminded him. “Sorry if I’m not quite up to your usual standards.” He barked a laugh. 

“It’s not that I think you’re not up to snuff, _God,_ I just-” He laughed again, shakily. “Can I help it if I want more, Aqui.” 

“Should I make you beg?” she asked, and then, seeing him open his mouth to retort, she plunged his cock back into her mouth. Whatever he was going to say ended in a stuttering gasp. 

She did work harder, though, forcing her jaw open just a bit wider. It was a dream, after all. She didn’t need to breathe. In fact- and Aqui had always loved a challenge- if she focused, she was pretty sure she could get him all the way into her mouth and into her throat. 

_“Fucking hell,”_ he groaned, and she flicked her eyes up to his, pleased, while she worked the flat of her tongue against the underside of his cock. “That’s- somehow better than I imagined-” His hips jerked, catching her by surprise, and she reached up to curl her fingers into his hips. Aqui slid her mouth off of his cock in one long, smooth motion, and then stuck her tongue out at him. 

“Been imagining a lot, have you? Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“You have no idea,” he said, breathless and serious. “I could fill a whole library about you, Aqui, I could be damned all over again for the sheer amount of depraved thoughts that you inspire with your little shorts and your fire and your _mouth-”_ His own dark tongue flicked out of his mouth and ran around his lips, nervously. 

Aqui chewed the inside of her lip, feeling something warm and almost painful weighing down her chest. She wanted to answer, wanted to shower him back with compliments, but- _I’ve never been good with words._ Never been great at accepting compliments, either. 

“What do you want, Luke?” she asked instead, softly. “Should I- keep going, or-” 

He dragged a hand through his hair. “You can’t ask me to choose,” he muttered, half to himself. “I want _everything,_ of course- on your knees and on your back and-” Luke bit his words off with what looked to be a painful effort. “I _don’t_ want to- infringe on any of your desires, or force you-”   
  
“There’s more to life,” Aqui said, cutting him off, “and I don’t do things I don’t want to do, Luke.” She waited a beat. “So, what I want is to absolutely defile all of this,” and she gestured around. “Let’s fucking do it, let’s put all that depravity to good use.” 

The heat in his eyes was back, and all it took was her opening her arms just a bit for him to drop to his knees too and embrace her. The world was suddenly extremely feathery. 

“Permission to bite you,” he asked, against her shoulder, and she murmured assent into his hair.

  
He didn’t bite terribly hard, just pressure really and the prick of slightly-sharper teeth than any human was meant to have. Luke stayed there for a minute and then moved downwards, tongue tracing the curve of her collarbone down to free her breasts and bury his face in them. She laughed, softly. 

“Everyone does that,” she said, somewhere between delight and exasperation. 

“Can you _blame_ me? Were you always this well endowed or was this one of His gifts?” He thumbed her nipples and she shuddered. 

“What, you think it made sense for me to have to bind these down under armor?” she demanded, and then, looking down on his face buried in her pale skin, shivered. “...No, I’m all me. Homegrown, or whatever.” 

“Good,” he muttered distractedly from somewhere around her navel, intent on pulling her robes apart. “Really good, refreshing, ah-” The robe wasn’t really meant to come off, open to the waist but solid from there, and with a snarl of frustration he took it in his hands and tore it apart like wet tissue. The air hit her bare skin like a slap of something much stronger, and she shivered again. 

“Shall I return the favor?” Luke asked, laying his head against her hip and looking up at her with an expression that if she thought about too long looked _adoring._ Aqui considered, and then shook her head, much to his apparent dismay. 

“No?” 

“No,” she agreed. “Just-” She didn’t want to compare him to anyone else, mentally, she realized. Everything about this situation was different and new and strange. “Just fuck me,” she asked. “Damn, I should have saved that for a birthday gift or something,” she muttered as an aside. “What _do_ you get the brother who has everything?” 

“Aqui. My turn- shut up,” he said, laughing against hers kin. “Up.” He nudged her to straddling him, lifting her so easily she barely had to move herself at all. She was expecting him to flip her on her back, but he didn’t- just kept holding her, suspended slightly above his lap. He looked up at her with an unreadable expression on his handsome face. 

“You are sure, of this,” he asked. “Far be it from me to question someone’s Desires, but-” 

“I’m not some blushing virgin,” she reminded him tartly. She hadn’t ever fucked a man, before, sure, but that was negligible to everything else. 

“Yes, but-” 

She bucked her hips out of his hands and down, bearing down onto his cock with no further ado. Neither of them were quite ready for it, gasping in time like an echo. 

“Fuck, Aqui,” he whispered, and she, determined to set some kind of pace on her own, rolled her hips against him and draped her arms around his neck, fingers very loosely curled around the base of his topmost set of wings. He growled and responded by his teeth into her shoulder again, same spot, just harder and with more edge. 

She rutted against him with quick snaps of her body. It took him a few minutes to really try and do more than sit there, but he made up for it by digging his fingers into her hips, a shocking, pleasing show of force that sent sharp little darts of pleasure up her spine. 

Luke took a breath, and then she kissed him again, and again, pausing briefly for both of them to luxuriate in the sensation of being wrapped up in each other’s warmth before resuming. For once, he was speechless except for his gasping cries, and for once she let down her guard enough to stop overthinking. Then she went back to enthusiastically grinding against him, once again delighting in watching his face and trying to work out what he liked. Aqui dug her fingers into his silky feathers and he bucked underneath her. 

“Aqui, Aqui, _fuck-“_

“I know, I got you,” she purred, her voice low and rough with lust. Okay, she could see why people liked this, liked _him._ She ran her hands over the span of his uppermost wing set, ruffling fingers through his feathers, and he twitched, and then, suddenly, grabbed her and _flipped_ her, effortlessly pinning her to the shifting cloudy ground. 

“Enough of that,” he growled,but smiling. “I’m not letting you take me apart without returning the favor.” 

“Luke-“ she whimpered, trying to move but his hands held her in place. 

“You really didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you, sister dear?” he laughed, breathless. Yes, she actually had- getting vulnerability out of Luke wasn’t easy, as a rule, but she’d been pretty proud of her success thus far. He leaned over her and licked from her throat down to one nipple, biting her breast and then kissing it like an apology. “So elusive, Aquilegia, it makes me want to pin you down like a butterfly.” He bit her again, and she squeaked. 

"So you can be cute,” he muttered. “I always wondered if you could be, or if it was all just the sexed-up goblin thing, all the way down. I like it, more of that I think.”

“You wish,” Aqui panted, trying and failing to squirm out of his grasp. “Who’s sexed up, anyway, you get naked the second you get a chance- mmmnh.” He cupped her breasts in his warm hands and she melted a little, rolling her hips against him encouragingly. Much to her relief, he chose not to respond, slowly, torturously resuming motion at exactly the pace he wanted and no more.

Time stretched into a dreamy silken haze. Aqui relaxed into it, and Luke did too, tentatively going from pinning her down to lacing his fingers through hers. Their voices, wordless with pleasure, mingled like a duet. She flexed her hands and found she could lift them; he wasn’t holding her to the floor now, and so she put her arms around his back and held on. His wings encircled the both of them, blotting out the pale, endless sky, and she startled herself by coming around him with a cry that was almost pain. 

He gave her a look that was maybe concern, but said nothing and simply covered her mouth with his. Coming down off her high, she kissed him slowly, dazed with sensation she wasn’t sure what to do with it. It was too much, and not enough, and she wasn’t sure how she’d ever survived without this feeling before. It wasn’t like she’d never fucked anyone before, on either side of the equation, but this was different in some undefinable way. Besides the obvious. 

_Because no one else is him,_ was the answer to that, the one she didn’t want to face up to, and she swallowed hard and focused on the soft down of his feathers instead, petting him like a cat. Luke, unaware as best she could tell, was starting to lose his rhythm in favor of _more, harder,_ and she reached up again to cup his face.   
  
“I got you,” she murmured again, barely a whisper, and he moaned against her and then went still. They were still quiet but for the gasping breathing, cocooned in his wings, and then he dropped them suddenly, leaving them exposed and cool. Nothing in this place should _be_ too cold, or too hot, but she shivered anyway, missing his warmth already as he sat back.  
  
“That was-” he started. “...Not a nightmare.”

_Oh._ For just a minute she had forgotten they _weren’t_ actually back in Heaven for some reason, desecrating holy battlegrounds. She wiped her face and realized she was crying, tears tinged pink with blood like a weeping statue. 

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she muttered, and he shook his head. 

“You know what I mean,” he said. “I-” 

“I don’t want to go back to talking, not yet,” she said, cutting him off. Now that she knew they were there, the tears burned. “Let’s just- not, for a minute.” 

She reached her hand out to him, pleadingly, and he reached back. It was a bizarrely halting motion, considering they had just been as close as it was possible to be, but suddenly the world was coming back into focus and she no longer felt she had the right. 

Their fingertips touched, and suddenly the clouds parted, dumping them both into freefall. Luke beat his wings hard and immediately halted his freefall, but Aqui couldn’t remember, suddenly, that she could do that too, and even when she tried, she failed, and she screamed, and hit the ground, and-

-and she was awake in her bed, in a borrowed apartment. She sat up and switched on a lamp, trying to catch her breath, and in the mirror across from the bed caught sight of herself- rumpled, shell-shocked, fucked out, and with a shining ring of a mark shimmering golden on her shoulder, where he’d bitten down. 

Her phone started buzzing on the bedside table. At this hour she was sure it could only be one person, and sure enough, Luke’s handsome face lit up her screen. Her hand hovered over it, and then she paused, long enough to let it go to voicemail.

“You should be asleep,” she whispered to it, as if he could hear her somehow. “You’ve got to get your beauty sleep.” 

For her own part, she felt awake, sore, and so cold, like she badly wanted a hot cup of something. Or- perhaps someone beside her in bed, warm and solid and real- and that someone was halfway across town. 

_Shit._

She flopped back into the bed and put a pillow over her face, huffing out a frustrated breath. Maybe if she called back, he’d come over- but that felt like crossing a line she knew she wanted but couldn’t do. A shower, maybe, then, and coffee, but in the end she just curled up back into her blankets and tried to get a little more sleep, or some solitary dreams. 

She closed her eyes and she was alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as meaningless porn and ended up crashing into feelings idk sorry lmao


End file.
